Experiencing Kane: an 'affective approach' to Sarah Kane's experiential theatre in performance

Deposited with permission of the author. © 2008 Dr. Alyson Evette CampbellThe thesis investigates the theatre of British playwright Sarah Kane, focusing particularly on her last work, 4.48 Psychosis. This play about suicide, written by a playwright who then committed suicide, has been widely, and understandably, read as a suicide note that can have little political relevance or engagement with wider society. The thesis responds to this interpretation and argues for a re-evaluation of Kane’s last work. It contends that alternative, more political, readings of the play are possible and proposes that close attention to Kane’s term ‘experiential’ theatre is one way to produce such a reading. The thesis, therefore, undertakes an investigation into experiential theatre, and does this through a dual practical and theoretical methodology. I approach the research as a theatre practitioner – a director – and as a scholar, with the result that the thesis is undertaken and organised as 50% written dissertation and 50% creative work. In the dissertation I theorize ‘experiential theatre’: what it is; how it works dramaturgically; and how this dramaturgy can be read as politically significant. I adopt a predominantly phenomenological approach to argue that Kane’s experiential theatre is concerned primarily with the embodied nature of spectatorship and the visceral affect of live performance, and that this is the site of its potential political efficacy. The creative work, my direction of a production of 4.48 Psychosis for Red Stitch Actors Theatre (July-August 2007), investigates the viability of this new critical framework in practice. Out of this combined practical and theoretical investigation the thesis concludes that, given an appropriate critical paradigm, it is possible to read 4.48 Psychosis as experiential theatre, and to theorise experiential theatre as underpinning the political engagement of Kane’s dramaturgy. However, in practice, the work is only ever potentially experiential, being contingent upon the decisions made by the creative team, the unpredictable outcome of those decisions upon the individual spectator and the material circumstances of the production itself